University of Luxembourg: Big Data for Security

The Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxemburg is reinforcing the European endeavours to make the Internet a safer place: it is now a member of the “Advanced Cyber Defence Centre” (ACDC).

ACDC is an EU consortium in which leading universities, research institutes, authorities and companies from the information and communications technology (ICT) sector are cooperating. Its aim is to offer new methods and technologies for halting criminal trends in the Internet. The NETLab research group, led by Prof. Dr. Thomas Engel, is now acting on behalf of SnT in the ACDC project.

The Internet is so big that no person could ever hope to keep track of it all. This applies to the sheer quantity of information as well as to the threat of malware. If they are to make life difficult for cybercriminals, expert ICT researchers and professionals have to work together – like in the ACDC project. “Scientists and professionals get together here to jointly develop new ways to quickly detect threats in the Internet and act against them,” says SnT researcher and computer specialist Dr Radu State who is representing SnT in ACDC.

The challenge lies in coping with the unwieldy amounts of data circulating through the Internet. “Each day, billions of emails are sent, search queries started and data packets transmitted,” State explains. “This is the perfect cover for malware and fraud attempts.”

The only hope of detecting isolated attacks in this vast ocean of data lies in the latest analytical methods. “We want to develop autonomous technologies that detect anomalies in the data traffic and provide evidence of criminal activity,” Radu State says. These technologies must be capable of analyzing the events in the Internet on a meta-level. The name for this level, on which individual data packets or user information become insignificant, is Big Data. “Only analyses of Big Data can help us,” State resumes. “Investigating the actual data stream for criminal activities would be a technical impossibility, and would exceed the capacities of all the servers in the world.”

Yet, the ACDC consortium favours Big Data not only for these technical issues – it is just as important when it comes to privacy. “It is important to find the balance between security and privacy,” State explains. “Internet users have become highly sensitive to this issue in recent times, and for good reason. And we want to boost their trust in the Internet with our security research.”